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Deeplinks Blog posts about File Sharing

Turns out Woody Guthrie lifted the melody of "This Land Is Your Land" essentially note-for-note from "When the World's on Fire," a song recorded by country/bluegrass legends, The Carter Family, ten years before Guthrie wrote his classic song. Here's a short snippet (380k mp3) of the song (the song can be found on the box set, The Carter Family: 1927-34). You don't need to be a musicologist to hear what we're talking about.

Now we've got nothing against Woody's borrowing. In fact, it's a part of the "folk process" that Woody himself championed. I can't imagine that The Carter Family minded.

A court decision today in a case against people accused of sharing copyrighted files on peer-to-peer networks brought some good news for those concerned about the way the recording industry is pursuing its litigation campaign.

In Sony v. Does 1-40, Judge Denny Chin denied (PDF) a motion to stop the RIAA from obtaining the identities of 40 people who were using the networks anonymously. But at the same time, he affirmed that their First Amendment rights should be factored into the equation.

Legal Notice:
Sorry Barbie, it's a free country and everything on this site is protected by the First Amendment right to speak, comment, and parody. So maybe you should give your lawyers a break from suing people for a while. Who knows? Maybe it'll give them some free time to ask you out on a date. Just think off all the shopping you could do on a corporate lawyer's salary! Seriously, does Ken even have a job?

The flag was supposed to be about indiscriminate online distribution. TiVo is trying to provide a device that allows 10 people within a personal network to copy TiVo-ed shows onto their PCs. It's perfectly secure. It's just not quite constrained enough for the studios.

And Hollywood is asking [pdf] the FCC to make sure that this TiVo functionality never reaches consumers.